Background story & Character Design

A story about greediness, ecosystem, and choice.

• Artist research

In Fairy Tales, I chose Pandora’s Box as my inspiration. I wanted to adopt the theme of ruins in this project. I want to create the feeling that after many years of the abandonment of a developed city, the deserted ruins make the ecology revive here. Then the characters I design should also have the traces of a developed civilisation, as well as the characteristically of a revitalised nature. When creating the mood board, I went through a lot of images and artists on Pinterest(Chen, 2023) and Artstation. I was also inspired by the work of Shubham Parte (Parte, n.d.). He is an artist from India whose work often features a combination of ruins, plants and architectural sceneries, and his work inspired me to create environments for stories.

• Inspiration/mood board

• Character design

For the exploration section, I started with silhouettes for the characters. I drew three different scenarios, and I think the third silhouette is not too lively and not too serious and dignified. It suits the character’s personality that I wanted to embody: confused, loyal, and persistent. I also designed her artifacts. As a knight, or guard, her artifacts contain her weapon, the lance. The other piece is her core. After being released from Pandora’s Box, she follows the guidance of her core and guards the remains of this large facility as if it were her mission. Twisted clocks and gears build up this core. After decades, vines also become a part of the core.

This is my draft proposal. You can see that I tried to incorporate a lot of geometric shapes into the design to increase recognizability. Such geometric shapes also reflect her personality and occupation in the character.

When adding the different armor, I also wanted to show off the botanical parts of her body at the same time. Therefore I kept the bare waist and legs. The vines are also an important part of the character, they symbolize the rejuvenated nature and her awakening of self-awareness. They are gradually replacing the industrialized, man-made assets that pollute nature.

When creating the colour scheme, I had three different options. In the end I went with black and green. Black has a sense of mystery and calmness. Green symbolises vitality and awakening and fits the theme better than the other two options. At the same time, the green colour is very similar to verdigris and shows the desolation after the destruction of the industrialised era.

World after opening the Box

• Landscape design & Fragments of daily routine

This is a draft of landscape and a fragment of daily life. After the absence of human activity, the ecology returned to normal, leaving only the remains of the city. Some creatures began to revive. Her usual life would be sleeping to guard the area. I also depicted the giant device that opens the magic box, but I didn’t think it made sense to have just the wasteland, so I added vegetation to reflect the feeling of desolation.

Silent Art book & Exhibition

Since my artbook and story were inspired by Pandora’s Box, I decided to complete my artbook in the form of a box. after sketching, I thought that the colour of the cardboard was just right for the scrap-industrial feel of it, so I used the cardboard to create the look of the box and stuck some moss on it, painted some decorations such as the metal parts. . I used some cardboard to make pins so that the box could be free to flatten or become three-dimensional. My idea was to have a picture or a mechanism on each side of the box, so that when the box is opened it can “explode” like Pandora’s Box and hold more pictures. I also made two additional hand-drawn drawings, one of the inside of the device that opens the box, and the other is an abstraction of the scene when the box is opened.

Artist’s statement

This story is inspired by the Pandora’s box. It discusses about humans’ greed and consequences. It warns people not to be blinded by the myopic benefits. Unsustainable development will finally become a hazard to our society. The interests that people think they have can also lose their meaning and fail to function independently due to the absence of human beings.

This character is a symbol of those abstract benefits. The story is her journey to find the truth and meaning of herself. She becomes mottled in wash of time, just as copper is golden when it is not oxidised, and becomes verdigris when it is rusted. The patina of copper also signifies the absence of humans and the rejuvenation of nature. I hope that the audience can gain from this work a reflection on the relationship and contradiction between human development and nature.

Critical appraisal

This project tells a story about Pandora’s Box. Due to the continuous development of human beings, the resources of the earth have been depleted, and now there is an urgent need for enough energy to ensure the continuous development of civilisation. The appearance of Pandora’s Box has rekindled people’s hope. However, the consequences of opening Pandora’s Box are unknown. No one knows whether they will be greeted with a glorious era or a deal with the devil. But the people have already been overwhelmed by the huge profits, and the power of the box and the wealth it can bring have become the goal of people who are eager to get their hands on the box.Disaster has finally struck the greedy human race. All that was left of this disaster were the remains of the buildings. The Pandora’s Box also left the world with a special being, Verdigris was born. She doesn’t understand the meaning of her existence, nor does she know her origins. All she knows is that she needs to guard this place. Nature destroyed by humans began to revive after being left undisturbed, industrial facilities and buildings were gradually covered with green vegetation, metals began to rust and weather, and buildings began to fall down. Some mutated monsters have appeared, and Verdigris kills these monsters that look like twisted clocks. While doing her job, she also explores her origins: why is she the only one still wandering around, where did everyone else go, and will she be able to find human kind, or recover them, and at what cost will that be. She made her way to the interior of the massive facility, where she found records of the Pandora’s Box. She understood that it was the opening of Pandora’s Box that gave birth to her, and it was the opening that destroyed humanity, it jumped the timeline to a time that was favourable to the planet, and it was the source of those twisted clock monsters. In fact, her mission is to return the planet’s ecology to normal and stop all creatures from wreaking havoc on it. And retrieving humanity pairs the price of sacrificing herself to return time to its original path.

The name Verdigris actually has a meaning behind it. In this story, the world after Pandora’s Box is opened is like the original shiny copper which is oxidised and gradually covered by verdigris. The process of the copper being replaced by verdigris is also the awakening of her self-will, and it is up to her to decide whether or not to let humanity return.

The aim of this project is to discuss the conflict between the rapid, even excessive, development of mankind and the healthy maintenance of the earth’s ecosystem. The dramatic conflict is Verdigris’s choice: whether to sacrifice herself to save the human race. It is also a choice that mankind has to make, whether to sacrifice nature to ensure the development of human society. The images I used to portray the character of Verdigris, the slice of life, and the artbook in the form of a box, as well as the idea behind the story, are the parts of the project that I think I was more successful in. I think I could have added some of the choices she was faced with, and her reactions when she found conflict. Scene painting was the biggest challenge I encountered in this project, I think I discovered my weaknesses in scene painting and I should practice more on scene colour and composition.

However, I learnt how to form a complete story logic chain in this project, and it also gave me the opportunity to practice how to draw landscapes.